We are living in a time when tragedy and loss is all around us.
Every day we hear official statistics on the latest death toll from the coronavirus pandemic.
The figures are truly horrifying. Hundreds have died in Northern Ireland over the past few weeks, tens of thousands in Britain.
It is untimely death on a scale that is difficult to fully comprehend, the moving tributes to those who have passed away provide a sense of the heartache and grief that so many families are experiencing at this time.
Against this backdrop of disease and death, when so many of us are in lockdown in order to save lives, it seems cruel beyond belief that a mother and child should die in a terrible accident so close to their own home.
Clare Smyth and her daughter Bethany, just three years old, were killed following a collision involving a quad bike and a tractor on the Whitepark Road near Ballycastle on Tuesday afternoon.
A second daughter, Hannah, who is five years old, was airlifted to hospital in Belfast after being critically injured.
It is understood that Ryan Smyth, a dairy farmer, was on the scene within minutes and the thoughts of the entire community will be with him as he faces the unbearable loss of his wife and daughter.
When such a shocking and unspeakable tragedy occurs, the natural instinct of family, friends and the wider community is to show support in all the ways that are traditional in this part of the world, by calling to the home and attending the funeral and helping in so many other ways.
However, the reality of the current crisis and the strict social distancing rules, means that so many of those expressions of consolation will have to be curtailed.
Even so, there is little doubt that everyone in the local area will want to support the family in whatever way they can.
Bushmills Presbyterian Church has offered prayers for the whole family, particularly for Hannah in hospital with her father by her bedside.
The entire community will be thinking of Ryan Smyth and the wider family circle at this desperately sad time and praying that Hannah makes a full recovery.
